


Deception

by Cywolf



Series: Descent [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Drama, F/M, darkish, ruthless!Tenten, written back when Orochimaru was still the big bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:40:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26098771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cywolf/pseuds/Cywolf
Summary: Tenten takes what she wants. She has to work for it, but that's nothing new.
Relationships: Tenten/Uchiha Sasuke
Series: Descent [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1894915
Comments: 15
Kudos: 24





	Deception

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the April 2006 challenge over on the ten_squared LJ community. Given theme: 'Fooled You'. Oneshot. Darkish, drama.

_there were maidens, very quiet, with no quiet in their eyes;  
_ _there were daughters of the silence in the valley of the shadow,  
_ _each an isolated item in the family sacrifice_

-Edwin Arlington Robinson

* * *

She didn’t think there was anyone in Konoha as free as she was.

Clanless, orphaned, there was no one in her life she was tied to, no one who could make demands on her time and affection. Mentorless, self-taught, her strength was all her own and she moved in her own lines, and there were no predecessors to overshadow her, no teachers who lingered, overlay-ghosts, in her motions. Ambitious, cool-blooded, there were no nights of crying over lost loved ones (she had never known them, and therefore never missed them), no idling for empty days – not with a dream burning hot and bright in her head, its light casting away all shadows – not with a marksman’s mind which saw life as targets to hit (or miss, _then_ retargeted and hit) - a mind which dealt with distances and accuracies and sharp edges.

She let no chains bind her to Konoha.

So, she could – if she wanted – tell the Hokage that she wished to take three days to train herself. With a mission-record such as hers, with all those A-ranks and B-ranks and even a couple of shiny-bright S-ranks in neat rows, Konoha was inclined to be very gracious. Besides, Tenten actually did use those days to train, unlike others – she always came back just a hair more lethal, her weapons just a tad quicker at the launch, her strikes just a little more powerful.

She could – if she wanted – leave the village alone, unwatched and unsuspected. She had no obligation to tell anyone where she went, or to arrange her schedule around another’s. She trained on her own, after all.

She could – if she wanted – be completely incommunicado for those three days, and for a generous grace period afterwards, because if she was busy with her weaponry and her training, it didn’t matter if she moved too fast and too far for the messenger-birds to find, if Konoha didn’t know exactly where she was, did it?

So they smiled and nodded and told her not to overdo it, they needed her – youngest captain in the ANBU, wasn’t it – for a mission or two next week. And she smiled and nodded and said witty things so that they laughed at her – such a nice young woman, even if her deathcount _did_ number in the triple-digits, even if she _was_ one of the Assassination Tactics Special Squad’s most efficient killers – and she smiled back at them.

She smiled just like she was smiling now, as the wind whipped at her hair and she knifed through the night like one of her own flung kunai.

_‘Fooled you.’_

* * *

She reveled in it, in the feel of the wind sliding over her and the whip-whip-whip of tree boughs as she sped past, bending branches by the vacuum of her passage, in the cool blast of air in her face and the clear night-sky she glimpsed in quick flashes through the canopy. The sound of the forest at night, the sound of her feet landing lightly, taking off again, the sound of the whistling wind and the fluttering leaves, all swirling together to make a music that sang in her heart.

For sheer joy she sang out herself, a few words in her native Yong rather than the Nippon of the shinobi nations, a short melodic snatch of an old, old song.

“Alone upon the housetops to the North  
I turn and watch the lightnings in the sky –  
The glamour of thy footsteps in the North.  
 _Come back to me, Beloved, or I die.”_

Her voice was high and clear in the deep night silence. She let the last note trail like the tail of a comet, holding the single perfect sound as she twisted through the air in a limb-extended axle spin, landing on a branch with perfect balance. She let herself laugh in pleasure at the ease with which her young, trained body obeyed her.

She didn’t know why she was so giddy whenever she went away. Perhaps it was the danger; or perhaps it was the anticipation; or maybe the rebelliously bright glee at fooling Konoha.

Or was it a mix of all three?

She knew the sight of her singing and frisking about in the night would have surprised – _shocked_ – many back in the village. She knew her reputation: Ice-Queen, heartless, asexual; holding herself aloof and apart. Her yearmates knew better, but sometimes even they caught themselves looking at her dark eyes when she laughed and smiled – and they wondered.

She knew she was a contrast, different from the other girls, Ino, Sakura, Hinata with their warm bright eyes and their hearts worn on their sleeves, medic-nin and jounin-sensei rather than ANBU weapons specialist like she was. She knew that her casual handling of personal matters, the way she had never broken down and shown herself irrevocably attached to one of them, seemed to be a lack in her - and they had never seen her cry.

She smiled a little more to herself at that. Even the coldest of the shinobi, quiet and more cool-headed than she was, had been seen to buckle, to be vulnerable in some obscure soul-deep way. She never had.

Her heartbeat sped up as she felt the change in the air, the way the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood, the sudden electricity racing through her veins. She accelerated, bounding from tree to tree in reckless headlong haste.

What did they know? Did they know how proud she was of the fact that she was self-made, that she had forged herself without the help of parents or teachers like most of the others had? Did they know the thrill-rush that she felt when she was on one of her deadly ANBU missions, dancing on a razor’s edge of pain and blood? Did they know how much she loved to be away from the village, the way she stared at the stars and traced sky-shapes with her eyes, or how she danced alone in the woods with her blades cutting the air around her?

Did they know of her shadow-lover, of the secret trysts she kept with him?

And she saw him now, standing quietly under tree-shadow, the starlight reflecting off the pond near him and glistening in blue highlights in his hair. He looked up at her as she neared, his eyes flame-red and blazing in the darkness, and she hurled herself into his arms, stooping like a hawk back to its master’s wrist.

They thought her ice, steel-cold as her weapons. They did not see how she burned under his own burning gaze, how hot she flared in his embrace.

‘ _Fooled you.’_

* * *

He was as pleased to see her as she was to see him, perhaps more. She didn’t have the time for even his name before he was kissing her, hard, his mouth hot and hungry on hers. One hand trailed to her hair to loosen her single hair-knot, running his fingers through the dark strands impatiently to make them free. She laughed a little as his fingers tangled in a loose elf-lock, windblown from the speed of her passage, then moaned as he seemed to take the laugh as a challenge that she wasn’t being kissed hard enough.

She felt her back hit the tree as he pressed himself against her, his hands running over the curves of her body. Her own hands tugged at his shirt, snarling low in her throat as he refused to detach himself from her long enough to take his shirt off. One of her ubiquitous daggers appeared in her hand and she literally sliced the fabric to shreds, beginning to pant from the feel of him against her and the need to run her fingers over his skin.

He smirked at her impatience, even if he was shivering from the sensation of her hands on his bare chest. The smirk dissolved as one of her hands dipped lower. He realized he was growling and ducked his head to hide the expression on his face, using the opportunity to trace the smooth line of her throat with his tongue. Her pleased moans vibrated against his lips, and his hands were tearing at her top as she had torn at his, only without the help of a blade. The shirt-fastenings fell to the ground, popped out of their moorings by his needy force, followed shortly by the rest of her clothes – and his.

He took her right there in the forest, lowering their bodies to the soft grass as she writhed underneath him. Their cries rang out as feral as their surroundings, uninhibited and wild in their secret places as they would never let themselves be in their respective Villages. She screamed as she came, and he screamed a moment after, their voices twining round each other as their bodies had.

When the world returned to them, he was sprawled on top of her, their chests pushed together against each other as they heaved for breath. Worried that he was crushing her with his weight, he tried to lift himself up on his elbows, but they buckled and he fell back against her.

She laughed and twined her hands around his neck, pulling his head down to hers for a slow, languorous kiss. “Don’t,” she murmured, her voice sleepy and sated. “I like how you feel.” She snuggled closer to him, enjoying his warmth like a cat in a sunbeam.

Too drowsy to make any real protest – and really, he liked how she felt, too – he slipped into easy slumber on top of her, his breaths falling slow and regular now. She remained awake for a few minutes more, shifting underneath her human blanket, playing a little with a strand of his hair and watching how the moonlight made the blue – really blue, not just dark-black – highlights come out. Then she smoothed a hand over his back, smiling a little as he made a contented noise in his sleep and shifted closer.

She tilted her head back to the sky, counting the stars idly. She remembered doing this back in the village, sprawled on a hilltop, her yearmates all around her, and marveled a little at how being safe in the village surrounded by so many other people she called friends could feel so alone, and how being in the dark of the forest with only one man – a man they said was crazy, vengeance-mad, souleaten by a serpent in man’s guise – could feel so different.

She thought she’d been happy in the village, with her rank and her prowess. She hadn’t known that she was happy only because she knew that this place, with this man, was waiting for her outside, irrespective of her rank. She thought that she could, as it would one day be necessary to, walk away from him.

She knew now she had only been fooling herself.

* * *

She told him in the middle of their lovemaking.

“I want…I want to have your child,” she told him.

Shocked, he froze, eyes staring deeply into hers. Emotions she had learnt to read flickered across his face as quick as lightning-flash: shock, surprise, disbelief, uncertainty - and a rising, growing hope. She knew his dreams: vengeance; to prove himself to an expectant world and to beloved ghosts – and to leave behind a legacy.

“You…you want to…” he stammered, uncharacteristically off-kilter. Eyes met eyes, both of them more vulnerable than ever before.

“I want to bear your child,” she said again, one hand lifting to trace the curve of his cheek. “I want…I want to have something of you left with me, for me, when you…” Her eyes filled with tears as she touched upon the topic they usually shied away from.

He bent down to kiss the salty tears away, licking at the new tears that fell from the sweetness of the act. He gasped a little as the motion reminded him that they were still joined, and unconsciously his hips began to rock against hers.

“I…I…would you?” he asked, less coherent as the seconds passed and his thrusting grew more forceful. “That would be the most…most…” he groaned, his grasp of language slipping away. “A child…you bearing my child…” His eyes rolled in ecstasy, only part of it from the feel of her beneath him, and the image of her with child – with _his_ child – touching something deep in him.

She kissed him, too far gone herself to say anything more, and in that moment everything coalesced into a beautiful promise. They came at the same time, calling each other’s names, and when it was over she rolled them over, straddling him and bracing herself on his chest as they panted for breath.

“You know…” she said, leering at him. “It _would_ mean we should work at it. As much as possible.” Then she gasped as he thrust upwards, amply demonstrating how well he agreed with her words.

“Oh, by all means,” he purred, voice deep and low, like a giant panther.

So they did.

And hours later, as twilight began to deepen the shadows, she pressed a kiss against his sweat-soaked temple, curled against him as he slept deeply. Feeling the pull of sated slumber herself, she rested her head against his shoulder, and smiled sadly – to herself, at him, at the dark world around them.

_‘Fooled you.’_

* * *

She came to Sound alone – the real Sound, where the horrible experiments were, not the façade left up on the surface for Konoha-nin to watch impotently, knowing they were useless but not having any other leads – blade-edged mind connecting the clues her lover had let slip over the months until she had figured out what Konoha would literally kill for.

She knew where Orochimaru was.

She slipped into his inner sanctum like a shadow into darkness. He knew she had come – she knew he had _let_ her past the guards and gates of his stone lair – but to know where to go, to win past the outer defenses as silent and smooth as a blade into water – she intrigued him.

She walked up to him, dark-amber eyes looking neither to the left or right. She ignored Kabuto as thoroughly as if he were a stump, and once she was close enough, looked Orochimaru straight in the eye and spoke.

“I would bargain with you.”

Curious, slightly amused, Orochimaru waved a long-fingered hand in lazy consent. “Go on.”

Her face was as still as ice. “Sasuke is to be your next vessel. If you give him to me, I will give you a Sharingan-bearing vessel better than Sasuke.”

“Oh?” Orochimaru said, leaning forward. “Sasuke is a prodigy, his Sharingan mastered to a point that most Uchiha never dreamed of. His chakra coils are larger than eighty-percent of the shinobi population. His body is trained and honed so that he can perform such high-level taijutsu as Konoha Senpuu. He is, in a word, the perfect shinobi,” Orochimaru stated, having reeled off the statistics like a man boasting about a new possession’s attributes. “What can you offer me to better this?”

“Yes, Sasuke is all that you have said…” Tenten took a deep breath. “But you were not able to perform any enhancements to him _in the womb_.”

Orochimaru and Kabuto looked more sharply at her.

“I know that in the fetal stage, the enhancement jutsus and seals have more effect, and in fact certain seals _only_ work on fetuses in embryonic fluid. I saw your notes in Konoha - Anko is careless sometimes…I know what you can do. You would be able to influence – _design_ – the body until it fits _all_ your specifications, control all variables…”

“And where would I get a fetus with the Uchiha bloodline?” Orochimaru asked, but his glinting eyes showed he already knew the answer.

“I carry Sasuke’s child in me,” Tenten said to the room at large, flinging her head up proudly. “I will give him… _it_ to you if you leave Sasuke for me.”

Orochimaru smiled – a grim, frightening thing, his too-white teeth against thin dark lips like dead moons in the sky. “Bargain met.”

“Bargain sealed.”

_‘Fooled you!’_

* * *

Everything around her was white. Walls, floor, light – even the thin gown they had given her to wear. The bright steel of the surgical instruments and of the operating table reflected back the surroundings until her eyes hurt from all the glare. She closed them, trying to relax as much as possible, only to have them snap open as someone entered the room.

Reflexively she shrank against the wall, one hand drifting to her stomach protectively. When she realized what she was doing, she let her hands fall to her sides and straightened.

Orochimaru smirked at her, his too-long tongue flicking out between his lips like the forked tongue of a lizard. Tenten suppressed a shudder. He began examining the instruments on the countertop, taking a barely-hidden glee in holding up the sharpest ones to the light as he caressed their edges lightly, just before the pressure needed to draw blood.

Tenten’s nervous swallow was loud in the sterile silence. She began to speak, loudly, brightly, so artificial that it was obvious she was doing it only to hear herself talk.

“So, so, this is your favorite examination room? It’s really very nice. I know, I’ve spent a lot of time in them.” A nervous giggle. “Really, actually, I’ve been doing research on them. You know, so that I…I can…understand…”

Orochimaru rolled his eyes lightly, setting out the probes in neat rows.

“Like, I know how hard it is to keep a room like this clean – clean to surgical standards. You have to wash with all those chemicals, smells something awful.”

Orochimaru suppressed a sigh as the empty-headed female behind him babbled on, clutching to the sound of her own voice to keep her growing fear in check.

“And I know that they have to be proofed against earthquake, fire, flood, sound, air – so that nothing can interfere with the operation. This unit is probably so well-shielded that it doesn’t even register in the outside world does it? No air escapes, no sound…”

Orochimaru moved in front of her, placing the knives and probes down near her so she couldn’t miss them. He enjoyed the way her eyes flickered to them, then deliberately moved away and stayed fixed in front of her.

He stood in front of her and began moving his hands in the requisite hand-seals for the deep-diagnostic jutsu he needed to ascertain exactly what he had to work with. Tenten watched the seals with interest.

“Oh, I’ve read about that jutsu. Diagnosis-function, isn’t it? Tsunade-sama invented it, but I heard you added your own modifications. Anko detailed them. How it sends your chakra directly through the subject’s own coils; how it imprints the findings directly onto your retina…”

And suddenly Tenten was behind him, her movements not even a blur but downright unseen, and a katana-blade – where had she kept that, she’d been strip-searched and confined – pressed to his throat.

“…and,” Tenten whispered in his ear, “You need to dedicate all your chakra to it once casting begins. Meaning…you can’t use any chakra for kawarimi, much less for one of your vaunted mastered jutsus.” She moved the edge of the blade so that it nicked his corpse-white skin, and blackish blood began to well slowly out of the wound.

Orochimaru, formidable mind half-numb at this unexpected occurrence, twisted snake-like out of her grip, ready to show her the error of her thinking she could challenge him. Or – he would have, if his muscles would listen to him. In dawning horror, Orochimaru realized he was absolutely paralyzed.

“Yes,” Tenten said, her voice full of glee, “Noticed that, have you? You’re more powerful than me, and it took a lot of work to get you here, in this place where your lackeys can’t come, and in a state so that I could overcome you. Still, I wanted to make sure, so I rubbed poison on all your surgical implements. The smell of the cleansing chemicals hid the smell of the poison; and it’s my own new brew, so you can’t possibly have inured yourself to it. I fooled you, snake, I fooled you _completely_.”

Orochimaru realized, slowly, that he was not going to achieve his dream of immortality. And he would be stopped not by Sandaime his old teacher, nor one of the other Sannin, his equals in legend, nor even one of the young powerhouses of Konoha – Naruto, or Sasuke, or Kakashi – but by this nobody kunoichi.

And that horrified him.

He wouldn’t have immortality. He wouldn’t even have the legacy of a mythical death.

“Sasuke is _mine_ ,” Tenten hissed, and decapitated him.

**Author's Note:**

> Because really, Orochimaru deserves an ignominious death. And Tenten, with her simple weapons that kill just as sure as any flash jutsu, is perfect for those stealthy, silent killings.
> 
> This was also a bit of an experiement at writing a darker sort of Tenten. 
> 
> Dedicated to yura_slash, and tao_empress and ladii_chocolate.


End file.
